Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday July 31, 2014 @08:29AM
from the genune-panaphonics-bearer-bills dept.

jones_supa (887896) writes "Nokia's future as a company focused on providing network solutions, rather than mobile phones, looks to be bright. The company made big profits in the second quarter of 2014 after selling its mobile devices unit — the cornerstone of Nokia's rise in the 1990s — to Microsoft. Meanwhile Nokia has been buying up other businesses such as the Chicago-based SAC Wireless. Now Nokia is acquiring part of Panasonic's network business in an effort to boost its presence in Japan. The deal announced Thursday will give the Finnish firm control of roughly one third of Japan's mobile network market."

No insult intended (seriously) but you were pretty much the only one who thought that. They are a Finnish company and that fact is well known worldwide. I can see how one might think they were Asian though since so much electronics comes from that part of the world. But Nokia got quite a lot of press regarding where they were from.

How about I rephrase... Europe wasn't known for their consumer electronics in the United States. Of that list, the only one that I was aware of in the eighties through mid-nineties was Philips, and I knew them mostly through their ownership of American firm Magnavox. I'm now acquainted with Siemens, Ericcson, and Loewe, and I've heard of a couple of the others, but they weren't the names of that time like Samsung (for low end), Sony (for medium-grade) and Pioneer (for higher-end) were.

Damn a lot of German brands and equipment in these lifts. I don't really know what the others may be (partly because I live in Sweden and Germany is closer I guess but also because it's the #1 economy of EU and fourth in the world (after US, China and Japan.)

Most people knew them for their snow tires before their cell phones. He must not live in the snow belt. I'm glad they separated the two businesses - I still buy Nokian snow tires and I sure as hell don't want Microsoft involved in my winter traction!

No insult intended (seriously) but you were pretty much the only one who thought that.

IIRC there was a joke in the first Michael Bay's Transforms movie along those lines.

I think part of the reason is that it sounds kind of like Japanese and Finnish and Japanese are kind of in the same language group. Not saying there are kissing cousins like the romance languages, but as languages go they seem to be orphans which share a common great grandparent.

No insult intended (seriously) but you were pretty much the only one who thought that.

IIRC there was a joke in the first Michael Bay's Transforms movie along those lines.

I think part of the reason is that it sounds kind of like Japanese and Finnish and Japanese are kind of in the same language group. Not saying there are kissing cousins like the romance languages, but as languages go they seem to be orphans which share a common great grandparent.

Sorry, but Finnish is part of the Uralic group and Finnic subdivision while Japanese is part of the Altaic language family and Japonic subdivision.

Not much similarity in the languages except for having a limited phoneme set. The most commonly known language that Finnish is related to is Hungarian. If there is a common parent to Japanese thousands of years ago it is so far back in time as to be irrelevant as to modern sounds.

But stick some substitute in some Finnish vowels that have the accent marks and no one would have confused it with Japanese.

Don't laugh. For years I would see golfers (lots of these in AZ) going by with those huge Ping bags, and I always assumed it to be a Chinese company. I was amazed to find that it was not only American but local.

"Ping" never got me, but I knew the word first from the film adaptation of The Hunt for Red October and its scottish pronounciation (even though he was playing a Soviet Lithuanian), and after that I new it from the ICMP utility. For me, if it had a language association it was scottish/English and technical, not Asian or Chinese in particular.

Actually, a LOT of people thought they were Japanese. I honestly don't know why that is. The syllables in the language are similar, but there's nothing really in the word "Nokia" that is familiarly Japanese.

And then, once some people discover Nokia is actually Finnish they will start up with the Swedish accents...

Granted, Nokia sold their phone/mobile device business to Microsoft and before that, I thought they sold their network appliance business to Checkpoint which is a BSD based kernel if I remember correctly. Old, but still fairly solid.

They started out in 1904 making rubber. Today they provide large part of Finland's export, so around here they are considered 'too big to fail'.

Importing a CEO from abroad was seen with great suspicion, which is why Elon made such a grand and public gesture of assimilating Finnish culture for a few months. - A venture about as daft as scheduling Tibet for two years to get enlightened.

Nokia has completely shifted gears before - they used to make forestry equipment at one point (early 70s?), which indirectly led to their making VHF radios with telephone interfaces for use out in the boondocks, which led to cellphones for them.

The VHF "portable phones" from the late 80s, by the way, can be hacked into becoming 2 meter (144 MHz) ham radios. Have fun...

Nokia had a lot of divisions, phones were just one of them. Nokia Networks however had previously merged with a Siemens division and became Nokia Siemens (not entirely sure if it's under the umbrella of Nokia as a subsidiary). There's also Nokia Research which I think is still a part of Nokia. Check Point was a partner with Nokia starting in 1998, but was never owned by Nokia. (I'm not sure what Nokia division that was)

Nokia is 7 years too late trying to be the company Ericsson remade itself into in the 2000. The key blunder was Nokia's backing WiMAX, a technology that was horribly marketed as potentially cutting out the major telecoms, whereas Ericsson helped create LTE with Verizon [ericssonhistory.com] by providing a solution for Verizon to upgrade from CDMA.
It's surprising to me that the tech sites have not trumpeted perhaps history's greatest example of a company paying the price for failing to invest in the next generation of technolo